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Studies in
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, I A
VOLUME 28, NUMBER 1
(SPRING 1998)
DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URB ANA-CHAMPAIGN
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STUDIES IN THE LINGUISTIC SCIENCES
Papers in General Linguistics
EDITOR
Elmer H. Antonsen
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
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VOLUME 28, NUMBER 1
(SPRING 1998)
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CONTENTS
Papers in General Linguistics
GEORGIA GREEN: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon
MOLLY HOMER: Conditioning factors for progressive and regressive nasal
harmony 27
JOSE IGNACIO HUALDE & INAKI GAMINDE: Vowel interaction in Basque:
A nearly exhaustive catalogue 41
YAMUNA KACHRU: Culture and speech acts: Evidence fom Indian and
Singaporean English 79
MOSES K. KAMBOU: The acquisition of Lingala tense-aspect by American
college students 99
HYO- YOUNG KIM: Prenucleus glides in Korean 1 1 3
HIROKI KOGA: English Tough Sentence Analysis of Japanese 'Intransitivized'
Verbal Gerund + Ar ('be') Sentences 1 37
ELIZABETH MARTIN: The use of English in written French advertising:
A study of code-switching, code-mixing, and borrowing in a
commercial context 159
EDWARD A. MINER: Discursive constructions of Kiswahili-speakers in
Ugandan popular media 185
JOYCE B. G. SUKUMANE: African Languages, English, and educational
policy in Namibia 207
REVIEW ARTICLE
Kenneth J. Wireback: The Role of Phonological Structure in Sound
Change from Latin to Spanish and Portuguese. (Dale Hartkemeyer) 221
Studies in the Linguistic Sciences
Volume 28, Number 1 (Spring 1998)
UNNATURAL KIND TERMS AND A THEORY OF THE LEXICON "
Georgia M. Green
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
g-green@cogsci.uiuc.edu
It is commonly taken for granted that the words in a language
are, as a matter of linguistic convention, associated with meanings.
This association is standardly represented in terms of functions from
expressions of the language to the objects in the world, which the
words (and compound expressions of the language) are claimed to
denote. This article surveys the evidence that this common assump-
tion is incorrect, and that much more often than is realized, the asso-
ciation is pragmatic rather than semantic, that is, a matter of inference
rather than stipulation. Accepting this view requires abandoning the
comfortable view of communication as the routine delivery of infor-
mation safely packaged in linguistic expressions, in favor of a view
whereby speaker and hearer must rely on assumptions about each
other's goals and beliefs to reconstruct intended referents and predi-
cations from linguistic objects which function only as clues.
1. Introduction
It is commonly accepted that terms for natural kinds (i.e., biological species, natu-
rally-occurring substances, and natural phenomena such as heat (but not sensa-
tions like pain)) are nondescriptional. That is to say, they lack any sort of Fregean
sense, and instead rigidly designate the kinds they are used to refer to, 2 as Kripke
1972 has argued proper names designate individuals. It is less commonly ac-
cepted that this analysis extends to the majority of common nouns, perhaps on
the assumption that human beings recognize essential differences between natu-
ral and artifactual kinds, and that these differences must therefore be reflected in
language (Abbott 1989). 3 Much of the literature discussing this issue does not
say anything about states and events, but it is probably fair to interpret this si-
lence as rejection of the position that adjectives and verbs might be nondescrip-
tional, especially since many of the arguments for nondescriptionality do not ex-
tend to states and events.
For Kripke, Putnam, and Abbott, it appears to be critical that the things that
nouns are the names of be antecedently existing natural kinds, with 'essences'. I
argue below that language-users do not know which kinds of things are natural,
and which are artificial, so whether the kinds have essences or are privately per-
ceived (see Nunberg 1978a) is immaterial to whether the nouns used to invoke
them are logically names.
2 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1 998)
Section 2 of this paper reviews the distinction between descriptional and
nondescriptional accounts of the semantic contribution of kind terms. Section I
details the rationale for a nondescriptional theory of kind terms generally as a r -
alternative to the (traditional) descriptional account. Section 4 demonstrates how
the relativity of 'normal' beliefs about the relation of a word and a class of refer-
ents and the arbitrariness of choosing a unique such relation as the basic
'meaning' of a word argue against adopting an account of how words contribute,
to reference that depends on lexically stipulated relations between words andl
particular kinds. Section 5 provides an account of how communication can be as
possible and effortless as it is in the face of the conclusion that the connection
between words and their intended referents is infinitely variable (and therefore
not a matter of lexical stipulation). In Section 6, I examine Abbott's arguments
against treating artifact terms as nondescriptional, and then, in Section 7, I sketch
an account for relevant phenomena which is based on a view of lexical semantics
in which nondescriptional meaning is not limited to the small subset of nouns for
natural kinds.
2. Descriptional vs. non-descriptional accounts
There is a certain ambiguity in the usage of the term natural kind term, with writ-
ers occasionally (cf. Abbott 1989:269) taking the Kripke-Putnam analysis of
natural kind terms for granted and using natural kind term to denote the prop-
erty of lacking a Fregean sense. Thus, they focus on the property of nondescrip-
tionality, independently of any characterization of words which may or may not
have this property. Other writers (Kripke 1972, Putnam 1975a, 1975b, Green
1983) use natural kind term and artifact term in their transparent, compositional
senses, 'term for natural kind', 'term for artifact'. This is how I will use these terms
in this paper.
Most familiar accounts of the meaning of individual words are criterion-
based ('checklist') descriptional accounts. This includes Aristotelian analyses,
feature-based analyses like those of Katz & Fodor 1963 and Weinreich 1966,
predicate-based lexical decomposition (McCawley 1968), Labov's 1973 parame-
terized accounts, and translational accounts such as those of Wierzbicka 1972,
1980. Some prototype theories of meaning are criterion-based and descriptional.
Descriptional accounts may be decompositional, spelling out the criteria for kind
'membership', or more attributive, doing no more than assigning kind membership
to its referent. Thus, an attributive-descriptional account would say that, e.g., tea-
pot means 'is a teapot'. 4 . /
According to descriptional accounts, the meaning of a word is a description >
that the (intended) referent satisfies. Saying that horse means 'large, strong ani-
mal with four legs, solid hoofs, and flowing mane and tail, long ago domesticated
for drawing or carrying loads, carrying riders, etc' (Webster's New World Dic-
tionary 1968:701) would be a descriptional account. Descriptional accounts de-
scribe facts about objects, and treat those facts as criterial for kind membership.
Where descriptional accounts treat the fact that horses are called horses as
something that follows from the meaning of the word horse, non-descriptional ac-
I
Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 3
counts treat it as a social fact, a fact about social custom in a linguistically homo-
;eneous group: the term folks use to refer to horses is horse. I hasten to empha-
ize that this account is not equivalent to a criterion-based, descriptional account
which gives horse a meaning, namely, 'thing that is called a horse'. 5 If names had
meanings that amounted to 'thing that is called by this name', then true sentences
like (la) and (lb) would be contradictions.
(1) a. John Robert Ross is not called John Robert Ross,
b. Haj Ross is not named Haj Ross.
It is no more defensible to claim that horse means 'is called a horse' than it is to
claim that the name John means 'is named John'. Both are just names that are as-
sociated, ultimately arbitrarily, with classes of individuals.
3. A nondescriptional account of kind terms generally
3.1 The problem of reference
As we shall see, Abbott's arguments that artifact terms should be treated as de-
scriptional depend on the assumption that the essential properties that define
natural kinds are different in nature from the essential properties that define arti-
facts, and on the assumption that human beings are able to recognize these differ-
ences. An account of terms for kinds that does not distinguish between natural
and artifactual kinds will naturally not require or allow any such distinction. An
alternative to the notion that kind terms are semantically associated with proper-
ties or characterizations of their referents was outlined by Nunberg 1978a 6 and
approaches the domain that linguists have been accustomed to calling lexical se-
mantics in terms of the problem of reference: How does a speaker's use of a word
enable that speaker to successfully refer to a particular object, class, or concept
(i.e., have her intention to refer to it recognized as such, following the Gricean ac-
count of the nature of meaning (Grice 1957))? Under a descriptional account of
reference, if successful reference is to be accomplished, when a speaker uses a
term, the addressee must be able to tell what subset of experience the term is sup-
posed to denote. Thus, minimally, the addressee must correctly identify the sense
(or intension) of the term, and from the sense, locate its extension in the real (or
other relevant) world.
3.2 The problem of polysemy
It is a commonplace observation that most words have more than one (apparent)
sense. This is evident from a glance into any desk dictionary. Thus, my New
World Dictionary indicates three senses for lemon (837):
1 . a small, egg-shaped, edible citrus fruit with a pale-yellow rind and a
juicy, sour pulp, rich in vitamin C. 2. the small, spiny, semitropical ev-
ergreen tree that it grows on. 3. [Slang], something or someone unde-
sirable or inadequate.
and five for gold(62\):
4 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1 998)
1. a heavy, yellow, metallic chemical element with a high degree of
ductility and malleability: it is a precious metal and is used in the
manufacture of coins, jewelry, alloys, etc.: symbol, Au; at. wt., 197.2;
at. no., 79: abbreviated G., g. 2. gold coin; hence, 3. money; riches;
wealth. 4. the bright yellow color of the metal. 5. something regarded
as having any of the qualities of gold, as great value, luster, splendor,
etc.: as, his voice is pure gold.
two for newspaper (988-9): '
1. a publication regularly printed and distributed, usually daily or
weekly, containing news, opinions, advertisements, and other items of
general interest. 2. newsprint.
and five for steel (1427):
1. a hard, tough metal composed of iron alloyed with various small
percentages of carbon ... 2. a particular kind of steel [depending on
carbon content]. 3. a piece of steel; something made of steel; specifi-
cally, a) [Poetic] a sword or dagger, b) a piece of steel used with flint
for making sparks, c) a steel strip used for stiffening, as in a corset, d)
a roughened steel rod used as a knife sharpener. 4. Great strength or
hardness: as, sinews of steel. 5. often in pi. the market price of shares
in a steel-making company ...
This means that if words have descriptional meanings, then what they denote on
an occasion of use is an exclusive disjunction of their descriptional senses. But
the problem is more than the ambiguity that is inevitable if terms are descriptional
and have a number of distinct senses. Massive ambiguity is merely computation-
ally awkward. The problem is that the number of kinds distinguishable by human
societies depends only on the human imagination, and consequently, there ap-
pears to be no limit to the number of possible kinds a term might name. Since lan-
guages tend to have a limited lexicon of basic, word-level expressions, there ap-
pears to be no principled limit to what, in context, a word may be rationally used
to refer to. Thus, lemon can also be rationally and unremarkably used to refer to
the wood of the lemon tree, as in (2a), to the flavor of the juice of the fruit (2b), to
the oil from the peel of the fruit (2c), to an object which has the color of the fruit
(2d), to something the size of the fruit (2e), and to a substance with the flavor of
the fruit (2f). I stop here only because this example is getting boring.
(2) a. Lemon has an attractive grain, much finer than beech or cherry.
b. I prefer the v 74 because the x 73 has a lemon aftertaste.
c. Lemon will not penetrate as fast as linseed.
d. The lemon is too stretchy, but the coral has a snag in it.
e. Shape the dough into little lemons, and let rise.
f. Two scoops of lemon, please, and one of Rocky Road.
Similarly, newspaper can be rationally and unremarkably used to refer to, among
other things, the corporation which publishes a news publication (3a), a copy of
the publication (3b), an issue of the publication (3c), the building where the pub-
I
Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 5
lication is manufactured (3d), the editorial staff which puts together the content
of the publication (3e), and a representative of the corporation (e.g., a reporter)
(3f).
(3) a. The newspaper agreed to extend the contract another year.
b. Be careful not to spill your coffee on my newspaper.
c. Yesterday's newspaper identified the gunman as Frank Tsem, but
the editor promised to run a correction today.
d. There is a picket line outside the newspaper.
e. The newspaper criticized the state for being unresponsive to the
needs of the people.
f. The newspaper missed her train, but will be here by noon.
The problem of polysemy is that it is in principle unlimtted. Suppose that artifact
terms are descriptional. This entails that artifact terms have extensions that are
strictly delimited in clearly expressible ways. Yet, as has been demonstrated (and
could be demonstrated ad nauseam), words are typically used to denote an almost
limitless variety of kinds of objects or functions: program unremarkably refers to
a plan, a schedule, a curriculum or course of study, a set of courses, a list of in-
structions for a computational device, a written representation of any of these, a
show broadcast on radio or TV, and potentially to a person responsible (in any
relevant sense) for any of these.
(4) a. The program of this group is to subvert the youth of America.
b. Their program calls for 10 pushups three times a day.
c. She entered the program in 1977.
d. We are expanding our program with the addition of two new
faculty members, and six new courses.
e. The program would not execute.
f. The programs are all smudged.
g. If you have a VCR you can tape your programs while you are at
work or asleep.
h. The program just called and said she would be late.
While an argument can perhaps be made 7 that (4h) represents a metaphori-
cal extension of the 'sense' of program, and should be accounted for by some
special mechanism, no such claim is plausible for (4a-g). There are two options
open to descriptionalists: either the meaning of any content word is vague
enough to encompass all of its uses/senses — this has been the claim of Charles
Ruhl for years (cf. Ruhl 1975, 1989) 8 or there is massive, perhaps infinite,
polysemy-as many different senses for program, pencil, horse (or whatever) as
there are kinds that it would be rational to refer to as programs, pencils, etc. All-
embracing vagueness, though minimally descriptional, requires essentially the
same apparatus for explaining how reference can succeed as a general nonde-
scriptional account does, so Occam's razor dictates eliminating the minimally
functional descriptional part. I am not supposing that speakers have conscious
access to representations of the criteria that descriptional meanings would repre-
sent, or that descriptions cannot be vague. If the descriptions are not specific
6 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1 998)
enough to be distinct from each other, then descriptional kind terms will have the
same extension, and extensions will contribute nothing to our understanding of
reference.
Now, we do not want or need to claim that as language-knowers we keep
track of a large, possibly infinite, set of classes of objects (events, situations, rela-
tions, properties) that a word could 'denote' or be used to refer to. It is enough to
know, Nunberg argues, that our knowledge of how to use language to refer in-/
eludes the knowledge that if a term can be used to refer to some class X, then iv
can be used under conditions that he describes to refer to objects describable by
a (recognizable) function on X. This principle can be invoked recursively, and
applies to functions composed of other functions, and to expressions composed
of other expressions, enabling diverse uses like those cited in (2) and (3) to be
predicted in a principled manner.
Nunberg (1978a: 1-28) presents cogent arguments against indefinite
polysemy. If the descriptional meaning of a word is a disjunction of senses, it must
be an infinite disjunction. Infinite polysemy would be tractable if it were describ-
able in terms of recursive rules to generate senses from (senses derived from) basic
senses. I believe that this is what George Lakoff's 1986 radial approach amounts
to, and it is the obvious approach to take if you are committed to the idea that
each word in a language is associated with a limited number of meanings as a mat-
ter of simple, stipulative fact — as part of the arbitrary conventions that distin-
guish one language from another. The problem is that it requires basic meanings,
and there are two obstacles to accepting that assumption. The first obstacle is that
while it is sometimes not too hard to identify word-to-referent relations that are
normal in a context, 'normar represents a social fact about language use, not an
arbitrary lexical property of a word. The beliefs that are normal within a commu-
nity are those that 'constitute the background against which all utterances in that
community are rationally made' (Nunberg (1978a:94-5)). What it is normal to use
tack or host or rock or metal to refer to varies with the community. These are so-
cial facts, facts about societies, and only incidentally and contingently and sec-
ondarily facts about words. More important, they are facts about what speakers
believe other speakers believe about conventions for using words.
Thus, it is normal among field archaeologists to use mesh bound in frames to
sift through excavated matter for remnants of material culture, and it is normally
believed among them that this is normal, and that it is normal to refer to the sieves
as screens. Likewise, among users of personal computers, it is normally believed
that the contents of a data file may be inspected by projecting representations of/
portions of them on an electronic display tube of some sort, and it is normally be- ^—
lieved that this belief is normally held, and that it is normal to refer to the display
tube as a screen. Whether screen is (intended to be) understood as (normally) re-
ferring to a sort of sieve or to a video display depends on assumptions made by
speaker and hearer about the assumptions each makes about the other's beliefs,
including beliefs about what is normal in a situation of the sort being described,
and about what sort of situation (each believes the other believes) is being dis-
I
Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 7
cussed at the moment of utterance. 9 This is what is irreducibly social about lan-
guage use and word meaning.
Nunberg notes a certain social character even in the case of the most unre-
markable referents for ordinary terms since, as he remarks, it is plausible to assume
that each speaker internalizes the same meaning 'not simply because phenome-
nological considerations force on him a single characterization of the designated
category, but because he assumes these same phenomenological considerations
affect other speakers just as they do him' (Nunberg 1978a:87). Naturally, I am
uncomfortable calling such sorts of facts 'meaning' and am inclined to say that
words do not have meanings, if by meaning is intended a function from words to
objects in the world, unmediated by beliefs about users of those words. 10
The claim that knowledge of how words are used to refer is partly social
knowledge (knowledge about social groups) does not entail (despite Putnam's
(1975b:227) sensationalism) that '"meanings" just ain't in the head', as long as
meanings is understood as referring to beliefs according to which words are used
to refer. Of course they are 'in the head'. How could they be utilized in reference
if they were not?
4. Contextuality — the relativity of normal beliefs
People often perceive the fact that the use of words to refer to things is depend-
ent on users' beliefs about each other's beliefs as inconvenient, and try to cir-
cumnavigate it by articulating a theory of meaning that is independent of par-
ticular contexts in that it refers to a so-called null context, where speaker and
hearer make no assumptions about each other. In fact, however, there are no such
null contexts in which utterances could be interpreted. When we are asked to act
as informants, and make judgements about expressions or their meanings 'out of
context' or 'in a null context', we cannot help but imagine SOME context con-
sisting of a speaker directing that expression as or in an utterance to some audi-
ence. We differ, as individuals, and on occasions, in how much context we import
into the judgement task, and in what we are willing to imagine when we try to
construe the expression as a sensible thing to utter on an occasion of the sort we
assume. 11 Consequently, if we abstract away from systems of normal beliefs that
inhere in all the various possible groups of users of a language (say, English), we
do not arrive at anything that looks much like what we imagine for a notion of
either 'normal English user' or 'normal English'. The usage of such a 'normal
user', depending on whether we abstracted by intersecting or unioning member-
ships, would either be that of a person who belonged to no subgroups within the
English-speaking world (imagine it — a person with no family, no country, no re-
ligion, no occupation, no avocations, no ethnic background — it would be the
epitome of a social misfit, and we would be saying it represented a normal user), or
it would be a person who was a member of every subgroup (a Welsh Kikuyu
Catholic Jewish evangelical Christian Muslim Hindu (etc.) needleworker profes-
sor literary critic computer hacker multi-sport athlete insurance salesman) and
his 12 usage would reflect the sum of all possible usages, and the problem of un-
limited polysemy would be staring us in the face again.
8 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998)
The second obstacle is that often there is no principled basis for identifying
one 'sense' as more basic or normal than another. For example, as Nunberg
(1978a:63-7) has argued, there is no way to decide whether the basic sense of
window denotes a kind of hole in a wall, or the framed apparatus that goes in the
hole (this is what window salesmen sell), or the usually transparent material that is
part of that apparatus (the part you refer to when you say that someone's home
run broke a window). Does newspaper denote a token of a kind of regularly pub-, *'
lished document, or one of the types to which such a token belongs? In general, it\
is not obvious whether the count sense or the mass sense of terms like fire or
night is best treated as the basic sense. Indeed, it is not even evident whether the
type use of common count nouns like cat is more basic than the token use, or vice
versa. 13
Nunberg' s solution 14 (or my interpretation of it) to the problem posed by
the relativity of 'normal' reference and the arbitrariness of determining a normal
referent in contexts where assumptions about normal states and beliefs do not af-
fect the determination is to say that if you treat relations among referential possi-
bilities as relations between uses, not relations between senses, then there is no
need to identify a central, basic sense or use, as long as the speaker judges
ACCURATELY WHAT IS A NORMAL USE IN THAT CONTEXT, (i.e., what the 'local' NAME
for that class, situation, property or whatever is), and as long as any referring
function that relates the intended referent to the ostensible referent is suffi-
ciently salient from the context, however defined. Nunberg 1978a elaborates on
both of these criteria in some detail. The bottom line is that the contribution of in-
dividual kind terms to sentence semantics is treated as a matter of reference, some-
thing ultimately indexical. Thus there is no need to make any distinction between
natural kind terms and artifact terms. Kind terms are just names for kinds, and as
with proper names, it does not make sense to talk about their meaning. As I have
argued elsewhere (Green 1983:6-7, Green 1996b), natural kind terms are essential
to compositional semantics in the same way as proper nouns and indexical ex-
pressions like pronouns; they can be used to refer, to point to a particular individ-
ual or kind. But it is just as nonsensical to give a semantic analysis of the word
raccoon or pencil as it would be to do it for Fred or Pontiac. Inferences, includ-
ing inferences of set relations, may be derivable from the use of the term, but they
are inferences about the sets, not about the words. As with names, there are no
linguistic limits on what sorts of things kind terms can be used successfully to re-
fer to. Kind terms, in this account, are words that name kinds of entities, properties
or actions, and include most common nouns, most verbs that take concrete argu-
ments, most prepositions, and many adjectives, but I will only be concerned here
with terms for kinds of objects.
A nondescriptional account of kind-term meaning amounts to the fact that if
terms like gorilla mean anything at all, it is just 'is a gorilla' or 'belongs to a cate-
gory sometimes called 'gorilla', but it does not say what it means to be a gorilla. A
language user could go her whole life without ever considering the question,
blithely carrying on conversations about flesh-and-blood gorillas, two- and three-
c
Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 9
dimensional images of gorillas, gorilla embryos, gorilla fur, gorilla meat, and large,
very intimidating human beings.
5. The achievement of reference
The theory of how words with such an impoverished sort of semantics can be
used to refer relatively effectively to only a subset of referents from among all the
classes of possible referents depends on a somewhat less impoverished account of
the social nature of 'word meaning": knowing what a person means to refer to
when she uses a word involves a Gricean regressus. It would not be enough to
know 'what a word means' since any word can be used without anomaly to refer
to so many different sorts of things. Nor is it enough to know that people (or cer-
tain people, namely those we are talking with) are disposed to use certain terms
with certain classes of referents in mind, because, if we have accurate knowledge
of their disposition, that will not guarantee a unique class of possible referents in a
context either. We have to say, as Nunberg does, that on an occasion of use,
when someone predicates some property p of some class described as q, we guess
at what (our interlocutor thinks we will guess 15 ) he means to refer to by q when
he is speaking to us about it having property p. That we guess with a fair degree
of accuracy is testimony to our sensitivity, but we guess wrong occasionally, and
surely more often than we realize. In general, we do not recognize how often we
mistakenly attribute our own beliefs to other people, and how often we conse-
quently misinterpret what they say. This fact follows from the universal belief that
people are rational — i.e., act purposefully, together with the (universal?) belief
that in the absence of specific reason to believe otherwise, other members of our
species are just like us.
In addition to assumptions about what uses are normal in which contexts,
speakers have access to a number of referring functions (strictly: partial func-
tions) of the sort mentioned above, such as 'type of, 'token of, 'possessor of,
'location of, 'work of, and to a (presumably infinite) number of composites of
these functions (e.g., 'location of possessor of, as in Chicago beat Dallas, 44-0).
These simple and composite functions relate classes of potential referents, and
they can do this even when reference is indicated ostensively — by pointing —
rather than by the employment of linguistic expressions. Thus, a truck farmer
could point to a bowl of creamed spinach, or a picture of a spinach salad to an-
swer the question, 'What are you going to plant on the north forty next spring?'
He does not communicate that he is going to plant bowls of creamed spinach, or
photographs of spinach, or cooked or cut spinach, but forms of spinach suitable
for planting (seeds or seedlings), by virtue of a referring function like 'source of
or 'source of image of. Referring functions enable speakers to use terms to de-
note several kinds simultaneously, as in a sentence like (5), where being herbivo-
rous is predicated of a species, but tipping over the garbage is predicated of a few
unspecified individuals.
(5) Raccoons, which are herbivorous, tipped over our garbage
can last night.
10 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1 998)
In the following excerpt from Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, implicit
and explicit references to Belgium denote successively a place, a nation or people,
and a government (Tuchman 1962:135).
Belgium, where [place] there occurred one of the rare appearances
of the hero in history was lifted above herself [nation, people] by
the uncomplicated conscience of her [nation, people] King and,
faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three /
hours to make her [government] decision, knowing it might be mor-
tal.
Assuming that normal beliefs license uses which we may call normal within a
speech community is not tantamount to assuming a core meaning or extension,
for two reasons. First, a normal use is just a use that is rational (i.e., reasonable to
expect to be correctly interpreted directly) given normal beliefs. Consequently, a
single term (like cat) may have several normal uses (e.g., 'type', 'token') within a
single homogeneous speech community. They can all be normal, and none of
them needs to be more core or basic than any others. Normal uses serve the same
grounding function for reference transfer/sense extending that people assume ba-
sic senses serve, but it is not necessary to posit 'basic meanings' for this purpose
to be served.
This leaves us with a picture in which a word can be used to refer to any-
thing which can be related by one of these functions, or a composite of them, to
something normally named by that word in some (sub)community. This amounts
to saying that a particular word might be used to refer to almost anything at all.
Supposing that there are a finite number of basic relations (even a smallish num-
ber, like 100 or 1000), the fact that referring functions can be composed of these
(recursively) means that an unlimited number of things can be referred to. Strictly
speaking, it does not follow from the fact that there is no mathematical limit to the
things you could use that word to refer to, that you could use any word to refer
to anything at all, but the spirit of the Humpty-Dumpty problem 16 - whether a
word can mean whatever a speaker arbitrarily intends it to mean - persists in ei-
ther case. Nevertheless, the view presented here is not as anarchic or Humpty-
Dumptian as it sounds, because rationality severely limits what a speaker is likely
to use a term to refer to in a given context. By this I mean only that people as-
sume that people's actions are goal-directed, so that any act will be assumed to
have been performed for a reason. This is a universal normal belief in Nunberg's
terminology — everyone believes it and believes that everyone believes it (cf.
Green 1993). The consequence of this for communicative acts is that people in-(
tend and expect that interpreters will attribute particular intentions to them, so
consideration of just what intention will be attributed to speech actions must en-
ter into rational utterance planning (cf. Green 1993, also Sperber & Wilson 1986).
This is the Gricean foundation of this theory (cf. also Neale 1992). In the context
of word usage, when a speaker rationally uses a word w to refer to some intended
referent a, she must assume that the addressee will consider it rational to use w to
refer to a in that context. She must assume that if she and her addressee do not in
fact have the same assumptions about what beliefs are normal in the community-
I
Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 11
at-large, and in every relevant subgroup, at least the addressee will be able to infer
what relevant beliefs the speaker imputes to the addressee, or expects the ad-
dressee to impute to the speaker, and so on, in order to infer the intended referent.
One might imagine simpler accounts than this. But by the time they are
fleshed out to accommodate the facts outlined above, it is not clear that they will
in fact be any simpler. Accounts that suppose a single common shared meaning
for each non-homophonous word in anticipation of adopting Nunbergian refer-
ring functions will still have to have a principled way of determining whether
type or token meanings, and mass or count meanings are more basic. Accounts
that suppose a single meaning for each term so vague that the distinction be-
tween mass and count, type and token does not arise must find some principled
way of predicting the regularity of mappings among uses on concrete occasions
that was sketched above. It is hard to see how functions could apply to some-
thing so vague and have this effect. Accounts that opt for polysemy will have to
come up with principled means for determining just what meanings each word in
"the' language 'has'. It is not clear that this is possible, in practice, much as dic-
tionary makers may try to draw a line between metaphor and 'meaning 7 or to
characterize all of the unremarkable possible uses of words. 17
No doubt I have made communication sound very difficult to effect, and
very fragile. I do not doubt that we are generally less successful at it than we
think we are, but in general, we are not conscious of the work that is required,
and I do not think it is all that fragile. Believing in the convenient fiction that
words 'mean things' 18 is what makes it seem effortless for us to use them to try to
communicate. If we were aware of how much interpretation we depended on
each other to do to understand us, we might hesitate to speak. The inferencing
that constructing or understanding an utterance requires (cf. Green 1982) is com-
parable to the inferencing we do in resolving structural or lexical ambiguity, or
inferring reference or conversational implicature, and indeed, involves the same
principles for inference. Fortunately for us, it is work we are not aware of doing.
For example, if we write something like Shape the mixture into walnuts in a meat-
ball recipe, we must be assuming that our readers will not consider it rational for
us to be referring to their making real walnuts by molding a mixture of ground
meat, egg, and cracker crumbs. If we attribute to the addressee as a normal belief
the assumption that uncooked meatballs are normally between, say, one-half inch
and two and a half inches in diameter, then it is rational for us to expect him to
find the referring function from an object to objects the size and/or shape of that
object salient enough to infer that by referring to walnuts in that context, we in-
tend to communicate that he should form meatballs the size he identifies with un-
shelled walnuts. And even if we attribute this belief incorrectly, we assume that
the addressee will be able to correctly identify the belief we incorrectly attributed
to him, and correctly identify the referring function 'size of.
Without the assumption that achieving reference requires inferences about
your interlocutor's beliefs about your beliefs (etc.) about what beliefs and uses
are normal in the context, we would have a genuinely Humpty-Dumptian situa-
tion: people would consider it normal to use any word for any thing any time at
(
12 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998)
all. Everyone would always be in the position we find ourselves in when we try
to interpret text like these paragraphs from an article in the Chicago Tribune
written to illustrate all the different senses documented over the centuries for the
word shamble(s):
She rested her feet on a shamble. Then she went out shopping, first
stopping to look at a shamble in a department store before going on
to buy meat for dinner at a shambles. The meat had arrived that
morning fresh from the shambles.
She bought a newspaper, which described the dreadful shambles af-
ter a battle in Bosnia. Then she returned home, found her dog had
knocked over a vase, and thought, 'What a shambles!'
Even if we know that shamble(s) might be used to refer to a footstool, a counter
for displaying goods, a meat market, a slaughterhouse, a scene of carnage, or just
any kind of mess, it is difficult to tell with any confidence which sense is intended
for which use, and infuriating to discover that it changes with each use! This
shows how dependent we are in normal situations on using assumptions about
(the speaker's assumptions about our assumptions about) the context to interpret
what is meant by what is said.
When a speaker uses a kind term like jazz 19 or snow, that term will be in-
tended to rigidly designate whatever the speaker expects to be understood as in-
tending to refer to, and it will be understood as rigidly designating whatever the
hearer believes it was intended to be understood as referring to, that is, as invok-
ing its name, or the name of the class to which it belongs, without characterizing it
or its class. To say that a term designates rigidly is to claim that the term picks out
the same referent in all worlds where that referent exists. So horse or snow or jazz
refers to whatever in a world counts as a horse, snow, or jazz in that world. As
long as terms are names which rigidly designate the kinds which are their in-
tended referents, the criteria for being a horse, being snow, or being jazz do not
enter into the designation relationship directly. Thus, in any world, horses can be
used to refer to whatever entities in any world| people in some worldj would call
horses in that world;, regardless of whether the counterparts of those entities in
other worlds would be called horses in the other worlds. Thus, the size, scale, and
uses of the animals are not the criteria which solely affect which ones can be suc-
cessfully referred to as horses when or where; from ourj point of view (indexing
speakers and referents to worlds), Eohippus is a horsej with respect to early Ter-
tiary times, but not with respect to periods since the great ice agej. 20 From an Eo-/
cene point of view, horsesj are a lot bigger than they, used to be.
Of course, not all words rigidly designate the entities they are used to refer
to. For example, there are non-rigid designators like pope, which designates who-
ever is the titular head of the Roman Catholic Church at a contextually indicated
time. In addition, I want to make it clear that I am not claiming that no words ever
have descriptional meanings. Some words have, in additional to an unlimited
number of uses related by referring functions to other uses, a sense which de-
scribes criteria for class membership just as a descriptive phrase like gray sweater
Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 13
indicates a referent by limiting it to something which is gray and a sweater. For
example, orphan indicates a child whose parents are dead, and kill refers to caus-
ing a change of state from alive to dead. The motivation for the claim that orphan
is descriptional, but horse is not, is that a horse with three legs which is not used
for carrying or drawing loads is still a horse, but an orphan whose parents are
brought back to life is not an orphan anymore. Putnam's (1962:65-70) 'one-crite-
rion' words (like bachelor or renate ('kidney-having') or cordate ('heart-
| having') surely have descriptional senses, as do all the words that are inherently
relational. Examples like kill and orphan are just the tip of the iceberg; Barker &
Dowty 1993 discuss several classes of relational nouns, including boundary
words like top, side, inside, outside, border, tip (but not iceberg), part-denoting
words like hand, whisker, root, wheel, chapter, and terms referring to socially sig-
nificant relations, such as friend, enemy, sister, citizen. Of course, some words, like
not, every, if and and do not refer at all, and contribute to the semantics of an ex-
pression syncategorematically, as operators, according to rules of combination.
Still others (like heck, hello, urn) do not even contribute to the truth conditions of
an expression, but only to the pragmatics, the calculation of what is to be inferred
from what was said. The question at hand is: to which category do terms for arti-
facts like pencil, pasta, and steel belong?
6. Some objections to treating artifact terms as nondescriptional
Three sorts of objections may be made (as for example, by Abbott 1989) to the
claim that artifact terms are non-descriptional.
6.1 Objection 1: 'Artifact terms describe function and external structure,
because this is visible'
The first one is that, contrary to Putnam's opinion, Putnamian Twin-Earth thought
experiments 1) distinguish between natural and artifactual kinds, and 2) show
that names for artifacts are descriptional. Abbott, for example, agrees with Putnam
that entities that looked and acted like cats but were really robots would only
count as robots, but reports the intuition that genetically reproduced organisms
that could be exploited like pencils would just be pencils. (I think I would be in-
clined to say that they were fruits (or creatures) that are used like pencils. If Twin
Earthlings call them pencils, that is mere coincidence, since on this history of Twin
Earth, there are no artifactual pencils.)
Abbott (1989:281) speculates that external appearance and function are the
denotation-determining criteria for artifactual kind terms: 21
Artifacts are typically made by humans and are categorized ac-
cording to their purposes, so we know how they are shaped and
what they are used for. When it comes time to name them we have
the reference-determining properties there at hand, we know what
we are talking about. It is only in the case of nature's species that
we have observable kinds whose real essence is mysterious, and so
only in that case must we leave the reference-determining properties
open.
14 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998)
Thus, the gist of this sort of argument seems to be: we cannot tell what the mem-
bership criteria are for biological kinds by direct inspection, so they cannot be
part of the meaning of natural kind terms. We can tell what the criteria are for arti-
facts, so they must be part of the meaning of artifact terms.
There are several problems with the conclusion that function and external
appearance determine the denotation of artifact terms, and with this sort of ra-
tionale for it. First of all, people's knowledge of the appearance and function of/
potential referents of terms they use is independent of their linguistic knowledge^
of those terms. Following the external structure and function account, a person
who does not know that a pearl is a natural object has an incorrect grammar, be-
cause he has the wrong sort of semantics for pearl, and his grammar should
change when he discovers that pearls are not man-made like beads are. While not
knowing whether something is man-made (or robot-made) and another is a prod-
uct of nature 22 may result in a foolish claim, it does not affect our ability to use
words to refer. The position that the semantics of words for natural kinds is of a
different sort from the semantics of words for artifactual kinds because natural
kinds are different from artifacts entails that the words rice and orzo (a rice-
shaped pasta) have different semantic relations to their referents, and that some-
one who does not know that orzo is manufactured (or that rice is a grain) has a
different grammar from someone who is better informed. The word pearl would
have to have a different kind of semantics depending on whether its intended
referent is (assumed to be) natural or artificial. This alleged distinction does not
seem to contribute anything to our understanding of words as they are used. If I
tell you that I am looking for a yarn swift, your ability to tell that there is some-
thing I want, that I do not have, that is called a yarn swift, does not seem to be
impaired by your not knowing whether yarn swifts are a natural kind or a kind of
artifact, nor would it be significantly improved by your learning that yarn swift is
a descriptional (or nondescriptional) term.
Second, external appearance is in fact a poor criterion for kind membership,
for both natural and artifactual kinds. Whales and dolphins look like fish; bats
look like birds; sharks, which are fish, look like dolphins. Indeed, the literature on
the acquisition of kind terms indicates that children as young as three years of
age ignore appearance when it conflicts with claims of category membership
(Gelman & Markman 1987).
One can also take issue with the notion that artifact terms are defined by
their exostructure, appearance and function. Yuppie catalogs of recent years dis- .
play desk telephones that look like Mickey Mouse, like footballs, and like sneak- 1
ers, so it cannot be their exostructure or appearance that identifies them as tele-
phones. Often the way they work is disguised; the dials or keypads are not ex-
posed, and the handset (what a peculiar term!) is just a detachable portion of the
'sculpture'. Yet, it is enough for someone to tell you that one of these things is a
telephone, for you to have a belief that you can use it for what you use tele-
phones for. You do not have to believe it has a dial or a keypad OR a handset to
do this. It could be a speaker-phone; it could do speech-recognition dialing.
Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 15
The purpose an artifact serves is no better a criterion for the extension of
artifact terms. Cordless phones and cellular phones are telephones, but their func-
tion will not distinguish them from 2-way radios. 23 Yet ordinary people consider
them telephones, and maintain the same expectations about communications on
cordless and cellular phones as about more conventional telephones, in spite of
high court opinions to the contrary.
I Finally, the assumption of descriptionality for artifact terms is inconsistent
'with the (Nunbergian) observations cited in section 3 that the reference of a term
on an occasion of use is determined by (speakers') beliefs about (others') beliefs.
Descriptionality entails either fixed references (basic meanings), or unbounded
polysemy, or both, and we have reviewed the reasons for rejecting both.
6.2 Objection 2: 'Multiple functions allow artifact terms to have multiple
essences, unlike natural kind terms'
A second argument against analyzing artifact terms as being non-descriptional
(cf. Abbott 1989:281-2) also seems to depend on the premise that if artifacts are
different from natural kinds 'in kind of essence' (Abbott 1989:282), then artifact
terms must be essentially different from natural kind terms. It assumes that the
essential properties of artifacts do not involve internal structure, but rather func-
tion, and cites the existence of artifacts that can be used for multiple purposes,
like a high-chair that folds down to a play table, or a cane that flips out to serve as
a stool, as evidence that unlike natural kind terms, artifact terms are defined by the
function of the artifact. However, it is not the case that a highchair/playtable just
is a highchair when it is being used as one, and just is a playtable when it is used
that way. It is always a dual-purpose object, even if it can only be used for one
purpose at a time. Of course, there is a referring function that gives the illusion
that these multiple purpose objects have multiple identifications or 'essences'.
This is the functional equivalence of particular classes of objects and other ob-
jects that serve the same relevant purpose. This function is commonly exploited in
metaphors like those in (6), and even less remarkably used when we refer to these
dual-purpose objects sometimes as highchairs or playtables simpliciter, and in-
deed, in sometimes classifying them for particular purposes as highchairs or as
playtables.
(6) a. You can use a newspaper to keep your head dry when it sprin-
kles, but this sort of umbrella is no use in a Midwestern gully-
washer.
b. In Dickens' novel about the French Revolution, Mme. LaFarge
knitted a catalogue of crimes against the people into the shawl
she was making.
It must be clear that I am not committed to identifying (members of) natural
or artificial kinds across or within worlds by reference to unrelativized essential
properties. I am not certain whether others intend the expression essential prop-
erties referentially or attributively in discussing the views of Kripke and Putnam
(cf. also Section 2, and Abbott 1989:287-8), but I have found no reason to be-
lieve that when speakers identify some individual as sufficiently like an X to be
16 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998)
called by the same name, that they all do it according to the same criteria (cf. also
footnote 20 (Gould quote)). Thus, quibbling over whether exostructure and func-
tion are as essential for determining category membership is doubly beside the
point.
6.3 Objection 3: 'Children distinguish between artificial kinds and natural
kinds'
A third argument raised by Abbott (1989:282-3) that artifact terms do not(
'express essential properties' (277, 287-8) is that the work of Keil 1986 shows
that by the age of 10, and often as early as 7, children treat manipulation of ap-
pearance as changing the category of manufactured objects (like birdfeeders or
coffeepots), but not of natural kinds (like skunks and raccoons), although kinder-
garteners do not reliably make the distinction. In fact, this observation only
shows that older children know that there is a difference between certain types of
natural and unnatural kinds, and can correctly categorize certain kinds. Indeed,
further work by Springer & Keil 1989, 1991 shows that the chief conceptual divi-
sion accessed by experiments of the sort Keil reports is not between natural kinds
and artificial kinds, but between biological natural kinds, and everything else. As
they put it, '...preschoolers consistently distinguish between heritable and non-
heritable features, claiming that only features influencing parents' biological func-
tioning are passed on to offspring.' Consequently, if we were to draw conclu-
sions for natural language semantics from the controlled investigations of young
children's abilities to classify objects, we would have to say that the words skunk
and raccoon (or flower and dog) are in one class, while water, pencil, and island
are in the other. In any case, I see no reason to take Keil's experiments as show-
ing that the terms for the two sorts of kinds (whatever they may be) indicate their
referents differently.
Throughout the arguments for a descriptional account of artifact terms runs
the assumption that there is a privileged and transparent relation between arti-
facts and the terms used to refer to them, that it is obvious what artifact terms are
supposed to be terms for, or, if they are descriptional, that it is obvious what they
are supposed to describe. But the question, 'Do artifact terms express essential
properties?' raises another question: properties of what? The very terms natural
kind term and artifact term presuppose basic senses and basic extensions, i.e.,
they presuppose that there is some natural or artificial kind that that term refers to
in a privileged way, so that lemon, by its nature 24 refers to a fruit, not to a piece of
candy or a poorly manufactured automobile. Yet, it is easily demonstrated (cf. also .
Sec. 4 above) that identifying 'the basic sense' of such a term is problematic, to 1
put it mildly. To take another example, even if we agree that the Constitution is
an artifact term, it is not evident whether it refers to a document signed at some
point in history and perhaps amended many times since then, or to the laws that
the signing (and amending) of that document enacted. With the assumption of
descriptional meaning, if it cannot be determined what a term denotes, then it is
not possible to say whether terms for artifacts express essential properties of the
objects they describe.
I
Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 17
If it is assumed that the classification of referents as species occuring in nature or
not is significant in determining the mode of referring of the term, such claims are
false, because terms for both kinds of species are unremarkably used to refer to
both kinds of objects. Lemon can refer to a natural tree, its natural fruit, or the
natural flavor of the oil or juice of its fruit-or to the processed wood of the tree, or
any manufactured object that resembles the fruit. (When pine refers to plywood
or lumber, is it a natural kind term, or an artifact term? When the governor's office
lis used to refer to the governor, is it an artifact term, or a natural kind term?) Is cof-
fee a natural kind term or an artifact term? Insofar as the answer depends on
whether the speaker intends to refer to a growing plant, its roasted fruit, or a bev-
erage brewed from ground particles of the roasted fruit, then the classification of
words into natural kind terms and artificial kind terms is at the very least, point-
less.
7. A nondescriptional lexicon
What if kind terms generally (both so-called natural kind terms and so-called
artifact terms) are nondescriptional names? We should no more expect terms to
name unique kinds than we expect personal names to name unique individuals. I
know lots of Susans and Bobs; maybe you know lots of Scotts and Jennifers. In
1989 there were two Jeff Georges in Champaign, and in 1990, two Keith Joneses
in the NFL, two Eddie Johnsons in the NBA, and two Jennifer Coles and two
Carol Tennys in linguistics. It is really quite unremarkable. But if we say that kind
terms are names for kinds, parallel to personal names, we do not need to say that
what kind they name is a semantic property of a lexical form (Green 1983, Kripke
1972). Lexical representations would detail underlying phonological forms, syn-
tactic category, morphological irregularities, and subcategorization:
PHONOLOGY /lemon/
CATEGORY noun
PLURAL-MORPHOLOGY regular
SPR
This is grammatical information. The fact that English speakers use lemon to
refer to all sorts of kinds that are related directly or indirectly to the fruit of the
citrus limonum is a cultural fact about language users, like the fact that there are
social implications of using certain specific words in certain situations to REFER
to their normal referents. Referring to a correctional institution as the slam-
mer or the joint implies a certain familiarity that using jail or prison lacks; not
saying please when making a request implicates a different kind of familiarity
(Green 1990, 1992). But these are not facts about a semantic correspondence be-
tween the word and the world.
This means, to put it bluntly, that grammars do not associate denotata with
words. Indeed, if kind terms are names for kinds, then since the kinds which a
term can be taken to name are indefinitely variable, and in general, no single kind
is logically prior to all others named by the same term, and the relation between a
kind name and which kind it is intended to refer to on an occasion of use is a mat-
ter of inferring a speaker's referential intentions, it is not sensible to say that the
18 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998)
mapping from words to kinds is a property of the individual words. Then how,
one might ask, do we know what the words mean? First of all, this is the wrong
question. To paraphrase a cliche, words do not mean things, people mean things.
And everything follows from this. (This is not a new idea. It is Paul Grice's story,
and Geoff Nunberg's, and in some ways, Sperber and Wilson's. I am just retelling
it.) As described in Section 2, when someone speaks, generally, and when she
uses a certain word, in particular, we assume that she meant something by it. If we
(presume that we) are the addressee, we presume that she believed we would/
know, or be able to figure out by virtue of our knowledge of what is normal in
various contexts and of the sorts of referring functions available, what she in-
tended us to understand by it. As long as she abides by this social contract and
considers what we are likely to take a word to be-generally-taken-to-name-in-
that-context, 25 there will be no problem.
If all the classes of potential kinds of referents are not going to be enumer-
ated (listed in lexical entries for words) or described via a descriptional meaning,
how is the diversity of potential referenda to be accounted for? Probably a
genuinely radical pragmaticist would derive part of speech as well as kind of in-
tended referent from context and a theory of relevance (Grice 1975, Sperber &
Wilson 1986, Green 1990), 26 but it is hardly radical to propose that pragmatic
competence includes knowledge of regular correlations between sorts of in-
tended referents. The correlations that I am thinking of are not to be understood
as lexical rules; they do not expand the lexicon, because, according to the view of
lexical meaning I have sketched, information about properties of the referent (of a
USE) of a term is not information that is in the lexicon, because it is infomation
about the use of a term. Such rules however, may entail shifts in syntactic proper-
ties, where those properties correspond to properties of referents. (This is a really
thorny issue, broached in Nunberg 1993 with respect to deixis and indexicality.)
Thus, in addition to rules like (7), which maps from count noun uses to count
noun uses, there must be rules like (8), which map between the count and mass
uses of a term.
(7) If a name can be rationally used to designate a product, it can be ra-
tionally used to designate the source of that product, and vice-
versa.
PRODUCT SOURCE
NATURAL KIND lemon [fruit] lemon [tree]
ARTIFACT newspaper [copy] newspaper [corporation]
PROPER NAME Picasso [print] ' Picasso [artist]
(8) If a name can be rationally used to designate an individuated object,
it can be rationally used to designate a substance derived from that i
object, and vice-versa. ^"
OBJECT SUBSTANCE
NATURAL KIND pine [tree] pine [lumber]
chicken [bird] chicken [meat]
ARTIFACT newspaper [copy] newspaper [=newsprint]
marker [pen] marker [ink]
PROPER NAME Shakespeare [author] Shakespeare [opus]
Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 19
Rules like (8) are necessary because they interact with determiner selection;
whether a noun subcategorizes for a determiner or for no determiner is a function
of the type of the referent, whether it is a mass or an individuated object (cf.
Wierzbicka 1988). Principles like (7) and (8) are parallel to the cognitive capacity
for deferred reference, which we have seen to be not specifically linguistic (recall
the discussion of deferred gestural reference to spinach seeds by pointing to an
image of prepared spinach leaves in Sec. 5). At the same time, they seem to be at
lleast partially independent of the rules for indexicals, which appear to be quite a
bit more complicated (cf. Jackendoff 1992, Nunberg 1993).
There are also category-changing rules (apparently language-specific) like
(9) and (10), which derive denominal verbs and deverbal nouns, respectively.
(9) If a word can be rationally used to designate an object or sub-
stance, it can be rationally used as a verb to designate a situation
(event, process, or state) in which an object that can be rationally des-
ignated by that word plays a role. (Cf. Clark & Clark 1979)
OBJECT SITUATION
PROPER NAME Willie Horton Willie Horton (an opponent)
NATURAL KIND milk milk (a source)
elbow elbow (a person)
water water (drinks; plots of land)
ARTIFACT trumpet trumpet (a communication)
bread bread (a portion of uncooked food)
bug bug (a location)
(10) If a word can be used rationally as a verb to designate a situation-type,
it can also be rationally used as a count noun to designate that situa-
tion-type.
EXAMPLES: run [intransitive]
capture [transitive]
kick [transitive or intransitive]
kiss
lack [transitive]
look [COMPS ] or [COMPS ]
Notice that rule (9) applies equally to proper names (cf. also Oliver North, George
Bush, Dan Quayle), natural kind terms (cf. also sugar, lead, salt, pepper, hound,
I ape, parrot, eyeball), and artifact terms (cf. also ring, glue, saddle, lace), and that
all such rules, but especially rules like (10) will be constrained in practice by fa-
miliarity with existent forms that are used to denote terms in the range of the
function, according to now familiar 'blocking' principles (cf. McCawley 1978,
Horn 1984, 1989).
Among the questions that have barely begun to be explored are ones con-
cerning exactly how many of these rules a language or culture has, and exactly
what their relation is to the referring functions, which being cognitive in nature
are presumably the product of a universal capacity. Obviously, in other languages
20 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998)
or cultures, these rules might entail morphological embellishment that a morpho-
logically underprivileged language like English does not have. Although the in-
ventory of linguistically reflected referring functions is cross-linguistically quite
robust (Nunberg 1978a), Jackendoff 1992 observes that some pairs of interpreta-
tions of nouns act differently from others with respect to binding phenomena, and
Nunberg 1993 discusses a wealth of issues involving agreement and pronominal
reference that arise from the possibility of both deferred reference and predicate, •'
transferral. It may be too early to say exactly what kinds of mappings exist be-(
tween lexical rules and cognitive relations, how much is conventionalized from
general, causal principles and how much redundancy an optimal model of our
abilities encodes. 27 These are questions we might not have been led to ask if we
accepted the claim that only natural kind terms were non-descriptional.
My purpose has been to challenge the notion that terms for artifacts
are different linguistically (semantically and pragmatically) from terms for natural
kinds. I have argued that Nunberg' s arguments against polysemy taken together
with his arguments against fixed basic meanings hold equally for the multiplicity
of unremarkable uses for natural kind terms and artifact terms, and argue that both
are linguistically no more analyzable than proper names.
NOTES
1 This work was supported in part by the Beckman Institute for Advanced Sci-
ence and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Portions
of this paper were read at the 1992 meeting of the Michigan Linguistics Society,
the Korean Workshop on Discourse and Pragmatics, the Sony Computer Science
Laboratory in Tokyo, at Northwestern University, and at the Director's Seminar at
the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois. I have benefitted from the comments
and questions of these audiences as well as from comments from Barbara Abbott,
Jerry Morgan, Gregory Murphy, and Alessandro Zucchi on a previous draft.
Naturally, none of them is to be held responsible for anything I say that they
would wish to disclaim.
2 Perhaps as originally ostensively indicated — Abbott (1989: 286) rightly distin-
guishes commitment to the causal theory of reference from the phenomenon of
nondescriptionality or rigid designation.
3 In taking the position that the generally accepted analysis of so-called natural
kind terms does not extend to artifacts, which she describes as a conservative po- /
sition, Abbott (1989:269, 271, 287) aligns herself with Kripke (1989:271), imply- V*.
ing that Kripke would severely limit the assignment of nondescriptionality. How-
ever, she admits that 'it is somewhat difficult to tell' (Abbott 1989:270) [the ex-
tent, in Kripke's view, of the nondescriptional class of words], and the passage
she cites as 'Kripke's clearest statement' (Abbott 1989:270) shows only that he
is cautious, not that he is 'conservative' (Kripke 1972:327):
...my argument implicitly concludes that certain general terms, those
for natural kinds have a greater kinship with proper names than is
Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 21
generally realized. This conclusion holds for certain for various spe-
cies names, whether they are count nouns, such as 'cat', 'tiger',
'chunk of gold', or mass terms such as 'gold', 'water', 'iron pyri-
tes'. It also applies to certain terms for natural phenomena, such as
'heat', 'light', 'sound', 'lightning', and presumably, suitably elabo-
rated, to corresponding adjectives — 'hot', 'loud', 'red'.
Kripke does not say that other terms are not like proper nouns in the relevant re-
spects.
4 Abbott considers this a nondescriptional account, saying that her account of
natural kind terms as expressing the 'essential properties' of the kind (1989:277)
is not descriptional in that the property expression it attributes to natural kind
terms 'is the minimal one of being of such-and-such a kind, e.g., being a tiger, or
being gold, whatever that entails' (1989:287-8 (fn. 6)).
5 Kripke (1972:284) rightly criticizes an account of this sort that he attributes to
Kneale.
6 This section interprets and elaborates on arguments given originally in Nunberg
1978a.
7 The argument is not worth pursuing, however, insofar as it is impossible to draw
a principled line between (poetic) metaphor and meaning (cf. Nunberg 1978b),
without invoking the notion of novelty, which involves an evaluation (by the
speaker) of evaluation by the hearer, and is thus a matter of language use, not of
lexical meaning. I find compelling the arguments of Nunberg 1978a that the same
principles account for both (poetic) metaphor and what many take to be ordinary
polysemy.
8 Thus, he would derive all of the use possibilities of bear and hit (but not kick
(Ruhl 1989:225)) from unique meanings, though he admits that he cannot repre-
sent those meanings (1989:63):
So what does bear mean? It should be clear by now that this ques-
tion cannot be answered in words; there is no single word or phrase
that can comprehensively capture exactly what bear contributes.
9 Nunberg 1978a gives numerous examples of this.
10 1 certainly would not want to say that a meaning is a function from a word to
its denotation on an occasion of use, because that would conflate meaning and
reference, and claim that, e.g., there was no difference between a 'literal use' like
(i) and a metaphorical use like (ii).
[i.J They waltzed through the room.
[ii.] They waltzed through the calculus exam.
1 1 Cf. Schmerling 1978, Green 1993.
12 Or her, if you like; the mind boggles at imagining the sex and gender of such an
individual.
22 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: 1 (Spring 1 998)
13 This does not mean that only they are genuinely ambiguous. There is no em-
pirical support for saying that window and fire are ambiguous because we cannot
say that one use is more basic than all the others, but that lemon is vague because
all the uses can be derived from a single salient use; ambiguity tests (Zwicky &
Sadock 1975) treat both types as ambiguous, not vague. Example (i) cannot refer
to a fruit in one clause and a piece of candy in the other, and (ii) cannot refer to .
an individuated fire in the first instance and the phenomenon fire in the second. (
[i.] Kim bought a lemon and Sandy did too.
[ii.] Some fire is beneficial and some isn't.
14 This account is greatly abbreviated and somewhat oversimplified, of course.
For fuller discussion the reader is referred to Nunberg 1978a and to the summary
and commentary in Green 1996a.
15 The recursion goes as deep as necessary, but usually there is no need to go
deeper than one or two cycles, if that many.
16 'When /use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means
just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.' (Carroll 1960:229).
17 Pilot studies of twenty or so 200-word passages of unremarkable prose show
that from 8-29 percent of the nouns, verbs, and adjectives are used in ways not
characterized by large desk dictionaries. Cf. also Nunberg 1978b.
18 What kind of things, I have always wondered. Cf. Austin 1963. There is a lot in
this article that seems way ahead of its time (it was written in 1940) - e.g., char-
acterization of what amounts to implicature, as distinct from implication; discus-
sion of the consequences of regular polysemous usages (amounting to referring
functions). Naturally, I reject Austin's dismissal (1963:7) of the idea that it is rea-
sonable to treat common nouns as names for kinds. Austin objected to this idea
on the grounds that while proper names are names of real individuals, if the des-
ignatum of a common noun is considered to be a kind, it is not a real thing, be-
cause kinds are fictitious entities. Insofar as there are proper nouns for 'fictitious
individuals' like Santa Claus and Satan, fictitiousness of the (intended) referent is
not a distinctive property of common nouns. He also supposes that common
nouns have connotation while proper nouns do not, and that this is also a good
reason to reject the idea that common nouns might be logically names. If all the
things that we believe to be (commonly believed to be) true of the individuals
that we take proper names to denote amount to connotations, then having con- /
notations or not does not distinguish between common and proper nouns either. ^
That we can use proper nouns as common nouns as in sentences like (i) points to
parallel modes of determining reference.
i. I'll trade you three Jose Cansecos for a Bobby Bonilla.
ii. Even the casual visitor to the Windy City discovers that there
are many Chicagos.
Georgia Green: Unnatural kind terms and a theory of the lexicon 23
The fact that proper nouns can be used as verbs (to denote a characteristic prop-
erty of the individual (normally taken to be) named by the noun, as in (Hi) just as
common nouns are (as in (iv)) corroborates this judgement.
iii. The strategy they adopted for the next four years was to Willie Horton
their opponents into a defensive position.
I iv. They trumpeted their discoveries from every pulpit available.
For more examples, see Section 7.
19 An enlightening discussion of this is to be found in Nunberg (1978a:81-6).
20 Pedants may object to my use of the name Eohippus for a species properly
called Hyracotherium (Gould 1991:90), but as it would be genuinely pedantic for
me to use that name when I have no confidence that it would be meaningful to
more than a few readers, I use what we must perhaps now take to be the common
name of this species. It is interesting that the usage of Gould (a paleontologist) is
to use Eohippus when discussing older works that call the critter Eohippus, and
Hyracotherium when discussing the beast itself.
21 Experts are not so certain that natural kinds are so observable. Cf. Gould
(1985:93-4): 'Nature, in some respects, comes to us as continua, not as discrete
objects with clear boundaries. One of nature's many continua extends from colo-
nies at one end to organisms at the other. Even the basic terms — organism and
colony - have no precise and unambiguous definitions. ... Some cases will be im-
possible to call - as a property of nature, not an imperfection of knowledge.'
22 Only the inventor of an artifact could be depended on to have this knowledge.
If it is granted that the nature and status of terms in the language shared by mem-
bers of the community therefore depends on the knowledge of a specific individ-
ual, advocates of desdriptional meaning for artifact terms must find their own sto-
ries to tell about the consequences of positing Putnamian experts: Putnam's
'division of linguistic labor' entails that knowledge of language is societal, not
individual, and contra Abbott (1988:286), requires commitment to a causal theory
of reference.
23 Malt 1992 offers controlled demonstrations that function is not a reliable clue
to category membership as reflected in referential practice.
24 To some extent, the research on categorization inspired by Rosch 1973 and
Rosch et al. 1976 may provide a way of narrowing the likely domain of a term in
\ uses presented out of context, since if a term (like chair) can be understood as the
name of a basic level category, it will be natural to interpret it (out of context) as
naming that basic-level category. However, this really provides very little help ei-
ther in any particular circumstance, because language interpretation is not carried
on out of context even in contrived experiments (cf. Sec. 3.3 above), or in gen-
eral, because most terms (including lemon and pencil) do not name basic-level
categories, and this principle gives us no guidance for them. Nunberg (1978a:29-
47) gives some principles which not only cover a considerably broader domain.
but are considerably more specific, and are framed under a set of assumptions
24 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28:1 (Spring 1998)
which does not presuppose a privileged, linguistically specified denotation. My
point here is simply that what class a term denotes is not a question that can be
insightfully answered out of context by reference to arbitrary grammatical stipula-
tions.
c
25 Of course, it is more complex than this. Often she must consider what I am
likely to take her to assume I am likely to take it to (be taken to) name. In princi
pie there is no limit to the depth of recursion here. See Nunberg 1978a:82-116
Green 1989:56-61.
26 See Russell 1993 for some details on how this would work.
27 Cf. Sadock 1983, Green 1985.
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Studies in the Linguistic Sciences
Volume 28, Number 1 (Spring 1998)
CONDITIONING FACTORS FOR PROGRESSIVE
AND REGRESSIVE NASAL HARMONY
Molly Homer
i University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
' homer@grimm.cogsci.uiuc.edu
The results of a survey of nasal harmonies triggered by nasal
consonants argue for independent conditioning factors for progres-
sive and regressive nasal harmony. Specifically, the only condition
on a consonantal trigger of progressive nasal harmony is that it be re-
leased into a vowel, while triggers of regressive harmony should mark
the right edge of a boundary. Schourup's 1973 survey of local nasal
to vowel assimilation suggests that similar conditioning factors gov-
ern local perseverative and anticipatory nasal assimilation. Several
motivations for the conditioning factors are considered, and tentative
phonetic reasons are outlined.
1. Introduction
This paper explores the relation between the context of a nasal consonant, and
the direction of the nasal harmony it triggers. Specifically this paper considers
whether the consonantal triggers of progressive and regressive nasal harmony
favor different contexts, and if they do, whether the same correlations can be ob-
served in local nasal to vowel assimilation.
Previous generalizations about the directionality of nasal assimilation do
not suggest a connection between local assimilation and long distance harmony.
In her survey of the feature nasal, Cohn (1993:159) makes the following observa-
tion:
...it is less common for long distance spreading to occur with antici-
patory thanprogressive nasalization. Only four cases out of the 61
cases of anticipatory nasalization invole spreading in a domain larger
than a segment; whereas 11 of the 30 cases of progressive nasaliza-
tion involve such spreading.
I Not only do the numbers that Cohn gives suggest that there are more pro-
gressive harmonies than regressive harmonies total, but they also indicate that
the percentage of progressive assimilations that are long distance is higher, es-
pecially as the total number of anticipatory assimilations is twice that of progres-
sive assimilations. Therefore, long distance harmony appears to favor the pro-
gressive direction.
For local assimilation, Conn's numbers suggest that anticipatory nasal to
vowel assimilation is more common than progressive nasal to vowel assimilation.
This coincides with Ferguson's (1975:181) statement: 'Nasality may spread either
28 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences (Spring 1 998)
regressively or progressively from a nasal consonant to a neighboring vowel, but
regressive spread is more common.'
A preliminary conclusion might be that local nasal to vowel assimilation
and long distance nasal harmony have nothing in common with respect to their
likely directionality: without considering any other factor, local nasal to vowel
assimilation is more likely to be anticipatory while nasal harmony triggered by a
consonant is more likely to be progressive. However, there are other factors to/
consider, namely the context of the triggering nasal. When this factor is consid-^
ered, common generalizations about directionality in local nasal to vowel assimi-
lation and nasal harmony emerge.
The first generalization is that in both local and long distance nasal assimi-
lation processes, a nasal consonant that is released into a vowel is more likely to
trigger progressive assimilation than regressive assimilation, and that this is
equally true regardless of the position within the word this prevocalic nasal oc-
cupies. For example, being in word initial position does not appear to increase the
likelihood of triggering progressive harmony. One result of this is that intervo-
calic triggers which might be expected to trigger either progressive or regressive
harmony, usually trigger progressive harmony.
The second generalization is that for both local and long distance nasal as-
similation, the likelihood that a nasal consonant will trigger regressive assimila-
tion is increased when that triggering consonant is at the right edge of some kind
of boundary (e.g., at the end of a syllable, a morpheme, or a word). For example, a
nasal in coda position is more likely to trigger regressive assimilation by virtue of
marking the right edge of a syllable.
The first goal of this paper is to establish the generalizations stated above
by comparing a survey of nasal harmonies to a survey of local nasal to vowel as-
similations. Section 2 describes the results of a survey of nasal harmonies with
consonantal triggers which I conducted, while section 3 reviews Schourup's
1973 survey of local nasal to vowel assimilation. Both surveys confirm the de-
scribed generalizations. For both regressive nasal harmony and anticipatory na-
sal to vowel assimilation, there is an implicational hierarchy of contextual restric-
tions on triggers: intervocalic triggers in a regressive assimilation imply the pres-
ence of syllable final and word final triggers, but syllable and word final triggers
do not imply the presence of intervocalic triggers in regressive nasal assimilation.
This suggests that the act of marking the right edge of a syllable or word bound-
ary somehow promotes regressive nasal assimilation from a consonantal trigger./^
No similar hierarchy is observed for the contextual restrictions on triggers of^
progressive nasal harmony and perseverative nasal assimilation. This suggests
that the condition of being released into a vowel is the only factor which induces
a nasal consonant to trigger progressive assimilation.
The second goal of this paper is to consider possible explanations for the
two generalizations. Section 4 considers and rejects phonological-representa-
tional accounts. The autosegmental treatment of feature harmony (exemplified in
Piggott 1992) does not predict a correlation between the context of a trigger and
Molly Homer: Conditioning factors for nasal harmony
29
the direction of harmony. Although the Optimal Domains Theory treatment of
feature harmony (described in Cole & Kisseberth 1994, 1995 a and b) allows ex-
pression of the correlation, it also allows the expression of correlations which
don't exist so the observed correlation must be stipulated. Section 5 explores the
possibility that the correlation logically follows from the nature of nasal harmony
itself, but no simple logical explanation is found. Finally Section 6 looks to the
phonetic aspects of nasalization for an explanation. Tentative articulator/ and
'acoustic motivations are outlined for the generalizations established in this pa-
per.
2. Survey of Nasal Harmonies
The appendix contains data from nine languages which display nasal har-
mony triggered by a consonant. For convenience, the results are summarized in
table ( 1 ). For each nasal harmony in the survey, the table indicates whether trig-
gers are found in a particular context, those contexts being word final, before an-
other consonant, intervocalic, word initial, and after another consonant.'
(1) Summary of Survey Results:
Context of
trigger
Language
Direction
N#
NC
VNV
#N
CN
examples
Capanahua
regressive
-
triggers but only if it also has word final and syllable final triggers. In fact regres- ^
sive assimilations that have only word final or syllable final triggers are much
more common. For progressive assimilation on the other hand, there is no prefer-
ence for word initial triggers. The only cases where a prevocalic trigger of pro-
gressive harmony is in any way restricted is when the trigger must have a certain
place, or where the target vowel must be word final, but not where the trigger
must be in a certain position.
Articulatory data from Krakow 1993 support the generalizations made about
anticipatory nasal to vowel assimilation. In a study comparing the relative timing
Molly Homer: Conditioning factors for nasal harmony 31
of lip movements and velum movements during the production of intervocalic
nasal bilabial consonants, Krakow 1993 found that when the consonant is a coda
(e.g., the [m] in 'home E'), velic lowering begins as the lip starts to rise for the
bilabial closure. In contrast, when the nasal consonant is in an onset (like the [m]
in 'hoe me'), the velic lowering begins as the lip completes its rise. This confirms
that at least in English, anticipatory nasalization is greater if the trigger conso-
nant marks the end of a syllable boundary.
To summarize, both the survey of long distance nasal harmony and Schou-
rup's 1973 survey of local nasal to vowel assimilation find similar conditioning
factors on consonantal triggers. On the one hand, all prevocalic nasal conso-
nants are equally likely to trigger progressive assimilation, indicating that the
only conditioning factor for a trigger of progressive assimilation is that it be re-
leased into a vowel. On the other hand, triggers of regressive assimilation fall
into an implicational hierarchy: nasal consonants which mark the right edge of
boundary, trigger regressive assimilation before other nasal consonants. This
indicates that the conditioning factor for triggers of regressive assimilation is
that they mark the right edge of a boundary. At this point the question arises as
to why these two factors should condition progressive and regressive nasal as-
similation respectively. The next three sections explore possible answers to this
question.
4. Phonological-Representational Accounts
Current phonological-representational treatments of feature harmony can't
account for the generalizations in a satisfactory way. The autosegmental analysis
of feature harmony as spread of association lines from an underlying feature
specification on the trigger has no account for the tendency for intervocalic
nasals to trigger progressive harmony. There is nothing in the representation
which would predict that it should be more preferable to spread in one direction
over the other. The diagram in (3) shows progressive nasal harmony in Warao as
resulting from the spread of association lines from a [+nasal] specification on an
intervocalic nasal consonant to the right, but given the representation in (3), the
association lines could just as easily have spread to the left. The fact that they
don't must be stipulated.
(3) Autosegmental account of nasal spread in Warao as seen in Piggott
1992.
[+nasal]
f
T
I.
M Vt 1
in a w a R a
In contrast, the Optimal Domains Theory of feature harmony can at least
express the correlation. Optimal Domains Theory (as described in Cole & Kisse-
berth 1994, 1995a, b) treats feature harmony as occuring when feature domains
<
32 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences (Spring 1 998)
have wide scope, which in turn results when alignment constraints require the
edges of feature domains to be aligned with the edges of prosodic or morpho-
logical domains. So for example, progressive nasal harmony would result if
alignment constraints requiring the right edge of a nasal domain to be aligned to
the right edge of a word outranked the constraints requiring it to be aligned to
the right edge of the triggering segment. Therefore Optimal Domains Theory
could express the correlation between trigger context and the direction of har-
mony by positing constraints requiring the edge of the trigger aligned to the fea-
ture domain to also be aligned with a syllable boundary. This is shown in (4)
where the tendency for intervocalic nasal consonants to trigger progressive har-
mony is expressed by a constraint requiring that the left edge of a Nasal Domain
be aligned to the left edge of a syllable boundary.
(4) Constraint: Align (Nasal Domain, left, syllable, left)
(i) [(na)(wa)(fia)] : '[ ]' mark the Nasal Doman, '( )' mark syllables.
However, the fact that progressive harmony shows no preference for word
initial triggers while regressive harmony does would have to be stipulated. Fur-
thermore, any similar patterning in local nasal assimilation would be accidental
because Optimal Domains Theory doesn't address local assimilation. Finally, it
might not be appropriate to approach these generalizations with any Optimality
Theoretic account as the generalizations describe cross-linguistics tendencies.
Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993) handles crosslinguistic variation
by changing constraint rankings, so to handle a crosslinguistic tendency, one
must make statements about preferred rankings. This could be done, but the
question as to why the ranking is preferred would still be left unanswered.
5. Possible Logical Explanation
It might be the case that the tendency for intervocalic nasal consonants to
trigger progressive harmony follows logically from the very nature of nasal har-
mony. Homer 1998 argues that nasal harmony is non-neutralizing. It follows that
nasal harmony from a consonantal trigger should spread in the direction of a
compatible segment which, if it were to undergo nasalization, would not have to
change so much as to neutralize a contrast. This predicts that the most likely tar-
get would be a vowel because vowels can nasalize easily with a minimal impact
on their contrastive properties. 5 Given the assumption that harmony should
spread towards a vowel, it follows logically that a trigger preceded by a conso-
nant will spread progressively, a trigger followed by a consonant would spread
regressively, but an intervocalic trigger could still spread either way. These con- f
elusions are summarized in (5). ^
(5) Logical conclusions assuming that nasal harmony spreads towards vowel:
- CN triggers will spread rightward.
- NC triggers will spread leftward.
- VNV triggers can spread either way.
The prevalence of intervocalic nasals triggering progressive harmony is not
explained by this line of reasoning. Another option is to propose the functional
argument that in order to be detected, harmony should spread into the word.
Molly Homer: Conditioning factors for nasal harmony 33
This predicts that word initial triggers should spread progressively, and that
word final triggers should spread regressively, but predicts nothing about word
medial triggers. These conclusions are summarized in (6).
(6) Logical conclusions assuming that nasal harmony spreads into the word:
- #N triggers will spread rightward.
- N# triggers will spread leftward.
I - # ... N... # triggers can spread either way.
One might argue that word medial triggers just pattern after the more default
word initial or word final triggers to achieve phonological symmetry, but in this
case one should expect some harmonies that have only word initial consonantal
triggers. None are found among the nine nasal harmonies surveyed in this paper.
6. Phonetic Reasons
There are possible articulatory reasons for the connection between syllable
final triggers and anticipatory nasalization. According to Bell-Berti 1993, it's
likely that raising the velum involves active muscular contraction, while lowering
the velum results from passive muscular relaxation, so one might expect the nasal
to oral transition to be quicker than the oral to nasal transition. 4 This predicts that
in general, anticipatory nasalization is more common. Krakow 1989, cited in Bell-
Berti (1993:80) finds that coda nasals achieve a lower velic position than onsets.
This might predict that codas in general make better triggers for nasalization than
onsets. Putting these two pieces together, one might reach the conclusion that
codas are better triggers for nasal assimilation, and that they're more likely to as-
similate regressively.
The articulatory evidence presented thus far makes no prediction about
progressive nasal assimilation. However there may be perceptual reasons for
prevocalic nasals to trigger progressive assimilation. In a perceptual test involv-
ing synthesized vowels, Stevens 1985 found that the nasal consonant in a nasal-
vowel sequence where nasality was extended 100 msec into the vowel was more
readily identified as nasal than when nasality was only extended 50 msec into the
vowel. Hence it appears that extending nasalization into the following vowel aids
in the identification of the consonant as nasal, as opposed to an obstruent.
7. Conclusion
In conclusion, there appear to be independent factors which condition pro-
gressive assimilation and regressive assimilation from a nasal consonant. Being
released into a vowel conditions progressive assimilation from a nasal conso-
nant, while marking the right edge of a boundary conditions regressive assimila-
tion from a nasal consonant. These conditioning factors are active in both local
and long distance assimilation, and result in different contextual restrictions for
the triggers of progressive and regressive nasal assimilation. These conditioning
factors are not accounted for by phonological-representational treatments of fea-
ture harmony, nor do they logically follow from any inherent properties of nasal
harmony. There are articulatory reasons to expect regressive assimilation in gen-
eral to be more prevalent, and for coda nasals to be better triggers. There are per-
<
34 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences (Spring 1 998)
ceptual reasons for nasal consonants released into a vowel to trigger progressive
assimilation. However, it is still not clear why regressive harmony should be
conditioned when a nasal consonant marks the right edge of a boundary: the ar-
ticulatory evidence presented here suggests that codas make better triggers for
both regressive and progressive assimilation.
One other question that remains is why the progressive direction is pre-
ferred for long distance harmony, while the regressive direction is preferred for
local assimilation. To answer this question requires a more complete under-
standing of the different natures of local and long distance assimilation than is
currently within our grasp. However if we assume that long distance harmony is
a higher level, or more 'phonologized' phenomenon than local assimilation, then
the beginning of an answer can be found in the results of experiments described
in Kawasaki 1986. Kawasaki 1986 finds that nasal vowels are more easily per-
ceived as nasal when in a context where they would not typically receive contex-
tual nasalization. If anticipatory local nasalization is more common, perhaps vow-
els following nasals are more easily identified as being nasal so phonologization
into harmony from local progressive assimilation is more likely. This assumes
that a crucial step in the development of a long distance nasal harmony from lo-
cal nasal assimilation is that the speaker-hearer actually recognizes the vowel as
being nasal.
NOTES
* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the fourth Mid-Continental
Workshop on Phonology held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, October 16-18, 1998.
Thanks to Jennifer Cole, Khalil Iskarous, Daniel Silverman, Jose Hualde, Patrice
Beddor, and Stuart Davis for comments and discussion.
1 Although I've included included Capanahua and Ijo as languages with word
final consonantal triggers, an examination of the data shows that none of the
forms in either language actually surface with a nasal consonant at the end of the
word. Descriptions of both languages propose underlying word final consonants
that trigger anticipatory nasalization, and then delete. While stated in synchronic
terms, these descriptions are probably accurate reflections of historical develop-
ments in both languages, so even though the word final consonantal triggers
have since disappeared, they were the original source of harmony emanating
from the end of the word.
2 The absence of triggers preceded by a consonant (i.e., in the CN context) most€
likely is not significant. It might be the case that the CN sequence itself is rare, so
there just aren't any CN nasals around that can trigger harmony.
3 Homer 1998 discusses an apparent exception to this statement: in Applecross
Gaelic, nasalization reduces the number of height contrasts among vowels, so
mid-high vowels block nasal harmony in order to preserve height contrasts.
However, when compared to consonants, it is easier to preserve contrasts on
vowels under nasalization.
I
Molly Homer: Conditioning factors for nasal harmony 35
4 Using auditory reasons, Bladon 1986 reaches the same conclusion. Bladon ar-
gues that the vowel to nasal consonant transition is less salient than the nasal
consonant to vowel transition because the first type of transition involves
'spectral offset'. As a result, the vowel to nasal consonant is more susceptible to
'auditory temporal smear' and therefore anticipatory assimilation is more likely.
REFERENCES
Anderson, Stephen. 1972. On nasalization in Sundanese. Linguistic Inquiry 3.
253-68.
Beddor, Patrice. 1983. Phonological and phonetic effects of nasalization on
vowel height. University of Minnesota Doctoral dissertation.
. 1993. The perception of nasal vowels. Phonetics andPhonology V: Nasals,
Nasalization, and the Velum, ed. by Huffman & Krakow, 171-96. San Di-
ego: Academic Press.
Bell-Berti, Fredericka. 1993. Understanding velic motor control: Studies of seg-
mental context. Phonetics and Phonology V: Nasals, Nasalization, and
the Velum, ed. by Huffman and Krakow, 63-85. San Diego: Academic Press.
Bladon, Anthony. 1986. Phonetics for hearers. Language for Hearers, ed. by
Graham McGregor, 1-24. New York: Pergamon Press.
Cohn, Abigail. 1993. A survey of the phonology of the feature [+/- nasal]. Work-
ing Papers of the Cornell Phonetics Laboratory. 8.141-203.
. 1990. Phonetic and phonological rules of nasalization. University of Cali-
fornia at Los Angeles, Ph. D. dissertation in Linguistics.
Cole. Jennifer S., & Charles Kisseberth. 1994. An optimal domains theory of
harmony. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 24:2.101-14.
.1995a. Pardoxical strength conditions in harmony systems. Proceedings of
the North-East Linguistic Society 25:1.17-29. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania.
. 1995b. Nasal harmony in optimal domains theory. Proceedings of the West-
ern Conference on Linguistics 7.44-58. Fresno: California State University
Fresno, Department of Linguistics.
Ferguson. Charles. 1975. Universal tendencies and 'normal' nasality. Nasdlfest.
Papers from a Symposium on Nasals and Nasalization, ed. by C. Fergu-
son, L. Hyman. & J. Ohala, 175-96. Stanford: Stanford University Language
Universals Project.
Gudschinsky, Sarah, Harold Popovich. & Frances Popovich, 1970. Native reac-
tion and phonetic similarity in Maxakali phonology. Language 46.77-88.
Hayes, Bruce. 1996. Phonetically driven phonology: The role of Optimality The-
ory and inductive grounding. MS. Rutgers Optimality Archive. Rutgers,
NJ: Rutgers University.
Homer, Molly. 1998. The role of contrast in nasal harmony. University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, Ph. D. dissertation in Linguistics.
van der Hulst, Harry, & Norval Smith. 1982. Prosodic domains and opaque
segments in autosegmental theory. The Structure of Phonological Repre-
sentations, part I, ed. by van der Hulst & Smith 1.31 1-36.
36 Studies in the Linguistic Sciences (Spring 1 998)
Kawasaki, Haruko. 1986. Phonetic explanation for phonological universals: The
case of distinctive vowel nasalization. Experimental Phonology, ed. by J.
Ohala & J. Jaeger, 81-103. Orlando: Academic Press. 81-103.
Kenstowicz, Michael, & Charles Kisseberth. 1979. Generative Phonology: De-
scription and Theory. New York: Academic Press.
Krakow, Rena. 1993. Nonsegmental influences on velum movement patterns:
Syllables, sentences, stress and speaking rate. Phonetics and Phonology
V: Nasals, Nasalization, and the Velum, ed. by Huffman & Krakow, 87-1 16
San Diego: Academic Press.
Loos, Eugene E. 1969. The Phonology of Capanahua and its Grammatical Basis.
Norman, OK: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Osborn, Henry. 1966. Warao: phonology and morphophonemics. International
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PiGGOTT, G.L. 1992. Variability in feature dependency: The case of nasality. Natu-
ral Language and Linguistic Theory 10.33-77.
Prince, A., & P. SMOLENSKY. 1993. Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in
Generative Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press [forthcoming].
Rich, Furne. 1963. Arabela phonemes and high level phonology. Studies in Peru-
vian Indian Languages I, ed. by B. Elson, 193-206. Norman, OK: Summer
Institute of Linguistics.
Safir, Ken. 1982. Nasal spreading in Capanahua. Linguistic Inquiry 13:4.689-694.
Schourup, Lawrence. 1973. A cross-language study of vowel nasalization. Co-
lumbus, OH: Ohio State Working Papers in Linguistics 15.
Stevens, Kenneth. 1985. Evidence for the role of acoustic boundaries in the per-
ception of speech sounds. Phonetic Linguistics: Essays in Honor of Peter
Ladefoged, ed. by V. Fromkin, 243-55. New York: Academic Press.
Teoh, Boon-Seong. 1989. Aspects of Malay phonology revisited — A Non-linear
approach. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ph. D. dissertation
in Linguistics.
Walker, Rachel. 1994. Hierarchical opacity effects in nasal harmony: An opti-
mality theoretic account. Proceedings of the Eastern States Conference on
Linguistics-ESCOL 1 1 .3 1 8-29.
Williamson, Kay. 1987. Nasality in Ijo. Current Approaches to African Linguis-
tics IV, ed. by D. Odden, 397-407. Dordrecht: Foris.
<
Molly Homer: Conditioning factors for nasal harmony
APPENDIX
A. Data from Capanahua (Loos 1969, Piggott 1992, van der Hulst & Smith 1982,
Safir
1982, Walker 1994):
From word final nasal that deletes:
37
/waran/
[want]
"squash'
/poyan/
[poya]
'arm'
/bawin/
[bawl]
'catfish'
/ci?in/
[cl7i]
'by fire'
/boon/
[boo]
'hair'
From word medial nasal before a glide that deletes, then nasal spreads right:
/wiranwi/ [wirawi] 'push it over'
/hisyaja?nwi/ [hisaja?wi] 'see sometime'
From word medial nasal that remains:
ciponki 'downriver' kmca 'bowl' kanci(n) 'banana'
blmi 'fruit' banawi 'plant it' hamawi 'step on it'
Rama?6na 'coming stepping' wiranai 'I pushed it'
B. Data from English (Schourup 1973):
raim
fialrrj
'rhyme'
'hollering'
fjum
klefots
'fume'
'Clarence'
Reign
riwainrj
'Helen'
'rewiring'
C. Data from Ijo (Williamson 1987, Piggott 1992):
(Piggott (1992:42-43) proposes an underlying word final nasal that deletes
for Ijo and for another Nigerian language, Urhobo.)
bei
'be full'
owei
'bite' 6
yari
'shake'
erei
'day'
kofonmbo:
'thin'
mdaa
'how many'
anda
'wrestle'
Omgbo
'seed'
umbu
'navel'
urjgs
'riches'
oyaya
'horse'
I
D. Data from Maxakali (Gudschinsky, Popovich, & Popovich 1970)
(It appears that Maxakali also exhibits progressive nasal harmony. The data
shown here are selected to demonstrate the regressive harmony only) :
p'iit y narj 'frog species' jowan'to open' kome^n 'city'
tomaan 'tomato' mayowon 'sun' plrpn 'noise made by jumping"
mihlem 'wood, tree' ?e?eem'who'
?amb'iyi 'needle' ?amb'ik'cook' ?ambii 'wind' haempjoebay
'a good thing'
38
Studies in the Linguistic Sciences (Spring 1 998)
E. Data from Arabela (Rich 1963):
naxe?
'his father'
naan ld ri?
'type of demon'
nai?
'stinging ant'
rilnyu?
'to come'
nuwa?
'partridge'
nyseaeri?
'he laid it down'
nasexeriti?
'did he say it'
riityasnu?
'to carry on the back
riiyeno?
'he is coming'
neenu?
'to turn over'
neysetu?
"daughter'
nununu?
'light beaming'
myaenu
'swallow'
mwiraettyenu?
'cause to be seen'
man:te?
'moth'
mau?
'mushroom*
monu?
'to kill'
maanu?
'woodpecker'
Ranu?
'to fly'
RyuuJ":Jsen6?
'where I fished'
Ruwa?
'a yellow bird'
Riyaerii?
'oldi
woman'
kanaage? "our father'
papanXRa? 'hollow'
komAfil? 'over there'
tinyakari? 'afternoon'
pokonagi? 'yellow'
keroril? 'deep'
karAk:koRwa? 'type of owl'
rupoRonu? 'to stick together'
F. Data from Land Dayak (Schourup 1973, Kenstowicz & Kisseberth 1979):
nlRin
nuwarj
nijum
snak
psmlrj
pimajln
ntakadn
'place'
'pour'
'kiss'
'child'
'dizzy'
'a game'
'taste'
nafian
nabur
malu
sirjau
simlrnrj
'bear'
'sow'
'strike'
'cat'
'ten'
najun
nu?a:n
me?an
kinam
umo
'swing
'open'
'eat'
'feeling'
'water'
mpahit 'send' sunok 'in need of
surjkoi 'cooked rice' samps: 'extending to'
G. Data from Malay (Teoh 1988, Pi
nawah 'soul, spirit'
riiyat 'wish'
narjke 'jack fruit'
nanti 'to wait'
mawas 'type of monkey'
mahasiswa'undergraduate'
merjaya? 'to sift'
mewah 'prosperous'
mampu 'affordable'
merjkuarj 'a species of grass
kesuffiyan 'stillness'
binase 'destruction'
sempurne 'complete'
urju 'purple'
pesamama?an 'the same'
ggott 1992):
nahu 'grammar'
nani 'to sing'
nampa? 'to see'
mahal 'expensive'
mlnoman 'drinks'
makan 'to eat'
ma?ap 'forgive'
mayarj 'stalk (palm)'
mandi 'to bathe'
niyo: 'coconut'
na?e? 'to ascend'
rjarja 'agape'
mlnom "to drink'
ma?en 'to play'
makanan 'food'
mati 'to die'
mayaf 'corpse'
rniqgu "week'
mendorj 'overcast'
benua 'continent' istane 'palace'
binatar) 'animal' ena? 'delightful'
barjon 'to rise' surjai 'river'
kebi:mbarjan 'anxiety'
ramai 'numerous' kemot 'crumpled'
Molly Homer: Conditioning factors for nasal harmony
39
elmu 'knowledge'
semue 'all'
ema? "mother'
ilmlyah 'scientific'
gurimdam'type of poetry' to:mbarj 'to fall'
ba:nge 'to be proud'
H. Data from Sundanese (Anderson 1972, Piggott 1992, Conn 1990):
laksemane' admiral"
>
jilar 'seek' Jiaur 'say'
jiaho 'know' jiaTatkin 'dry'
nuS'us 'dry' rjatur 'arrange'
rjudag 'pursue' rjisar 'displace'
rjiwat 'elope' rjajak 'sift'
rjobah 'change' mTTasih 'love'
mahal 'expensive' marios 'examine
binhar 'to be rich' kumaha 'how?'
dumlhls 'to approach'
nalan 'wet'
nuhurkin 'dry'
riiSIs 'relax in a cool place'
rjuliat 'stretch'
qaluhuran 'to be in a high position'
maro 'to halve'
rrilhak 'take sides'
gumade 'to be big'
pinarjgih "to find"
I. Data from Warao (Osborn 1966, Piggott 1992):
na5 'come* moau 'give it to him"
moyo 'cormorant' mehokohi 'shadow'
inawaha 'summer' horilwaku 'turtle'
no codas allowed (Osborn 1966)
I
(
(
►
Studies in the Linguistic Sciences
Volume 28, Number 1 (Spring 1998)
VOWEL INTERACTION IN BASQUE:
A NEARLY EXHAUSTIVE CATALOGUE*
Jose Ignacio Hualde
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
j-hualde@uiuc.edu
Inaki Gaminde
Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea
tlpgatei@lgdx04.lg.ehu.es
The treatment of vowel sequences in Basque inflectional mor-
phology has played a prominent role in discussions of rule interaction,
literally becoming a textbook example of extrinsic rule ordering (cf. de
Rijk 1970, Kenstowicz & Kisseberth 1979:176-7, Kenstowicz 1994:21-
2, 126-7, Lakoff 1993, Kirchner 1997, Trask 1996:92-3). However,
perhaps because of the incomplete sources, the facts are often misrep-
resented. Thus Kenstowicz & Kisseberth 1979 mix facts from different
dialects and Trask's 1996 'conservative Bizkaian', which he uses to
illustrate rule reordering, is purely fictional. In addition, the incom-
pleteness of the data that are presented can be misleading. The reader
may conclude that no other possibilities are found (or could be found).
This is enough reason to justify the compilation of facts that we under-
take in this paper. Another important reason, of course, is that as a
consequence of the difusion of standard Basque much of the existing
diversity in the treatment of vowel sequences in Basque can be ex-
pected to disappear in the near future. It is thus important to document
these facts in an easily available source.
1. Attested patterns
Inflected singular and plural forms arose historically by the affixation of the distal
demonstrative (h)a(r): *gizon (h)a(r) 'that man 7 > gizona 'the man'. This origin is
obvious when we compare, for instance, dative forms such as gizonari 'to the
man' and gizon (h)ari 'to that man' (see Michelena 1977:218, 1981). Other de-
monstratives have also developed into suffixes. In this paper we will focus on the
absolutive singular, which is the citation form. The basic shape of the absolutive
singular suffix is -a, added to the uninfected stem, as in gizon 'man', gizona 'the
man'.:'
The vowel sequences resulting from suffixation of the singular determiner to
stems ending in different vowels have undergone a great number of different
changes in different areas. Thus, the absolutive singular of, for instance, a stem
ending in -o, such as beso 'arm', may be besoa, besua, besue, besu, etc. depend-
ing on the variety. A nearly exhaustive catalog of the patterns that have been
documented for the absolutive singular is given in Table I. Each pattern is identi-
42
Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28: l (Spring 1998)
fied by a representative variety. The output for each of the historical (or, if one
wishes, 'underlying') sequences resulting from affixing the singular determiner -a
to stems ending in each of the five vowels is listed in a separate column (The
sound represented as -y- may range from a glide, to a voiced nonstrident palatal
fricative [j] to a voiced palatal stop [j], depending on the variety, similarly l-b-l
may be a stop [b] or an approximant [£])
Table 1: Treatment of vowel sequences in the absolutive singular
a + a
e + a
o + a ]
+ a
u + a
1. Standard Basque
a
ea
oa i
a
ua
2. Literary Bizkaian
ea
ea
oa i
a
ua
3. Arratia
ea
ea
oa i
e
ue
4. Getxo
e
e
1
u
5. 18th cent Markina
ia
ia
ua i
za
uba
6. Lekeitio/Deba
ia
ia
ua i
za/isa
ua
7. Bermeo
ie
ie
ue i
ze
ue
8. Gernika
ie
ie
oa
ze
ue
9. Elantxobe
u
ze
u
10. Larrauri
ia
ia
oa
ze
ue
1 1 . Errezil
ia
ia
ua
u
12. Urdiain
ia
ia
ua
(y)a
u(b)a
13. Zumaia
aa
ia
ua
sa
ua
14. Zarautz
a
ia
ua
ya
ua
15. Alegia
a
ea
oa
e
ue
16. Etxarri
a
ie
ue
ye
ube
17. Lizarraga
a
je
ue
ye
ube
18. Ultzama
a
ja
ua
ie
ue
19. Basaburua
a
ii
oa
ii
uu
20. Beruete
a
ee
oa
i
uu
21. Baztan
a
ja
ua
e
ue
22. Aezkoa
a
ea
oa
ia
ua
23. Zaraitzu
ara
ea
oa
ia
ua
24. Erronkari
a
ea
oa
ia
ja
25. Zuberoa
a
ia
ua
ia
ia
26. Sara
a
ja
ua
ia
ua
27. Beskoitze
a
ja
ua
ia
uya (iia, ia)
28. Arbona
a
ja
ua
ia
ua
29. Aiherra
a
ia
ua
ia
ja
(
The patterns in Table I are roughly organized in terms of geographical dis-
tribution. On the basis of the treatment of vowel sequences, we can establish the
following major dialectal groups (see Map 1):
A. Western dialects (mostly Bizkaian): Types 2-12 (those which present
reflects of the dissimilation a + a > ea . To the west of isogloss 1 on
the map).
B. Central dialects (mostly Gipuzkoan): Types 14-16.
HUALDE & GAMINDE: VOWEL INTERACTION IN BASQUE
43
C. Navarrese dialects: Types 17-24 (with rising diphthongs. To the east of
isogloss 2 on the map)
D. Northern dialects: Types 25-29
Map 1: Basque dialect areas
Bay of Biscay
Donostia
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San Sebastian,.
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Gernika
y^L^sis^^
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